I like visual novels well enough, I just think there’s a lot disingenuous about the presentation and marketing of Telltale’s products as anything but visual novels b
Is Borderlands really all that popular still? Like I remember seeing the first few games everywhere, and people talking about them, but that was years ago. I realize I’m biased but I would expect to hear something about them…
Does 1 get better? I have 1 and 2 from a bundle years ago and started the first game. It’s sooo boring, like all the bad stuff from an mmo but single player. I don’t want to walk from a Hub to place A multiple times and just the spawning mobs change based on the quest.
Or if 1 doesn’t get better, can I play 2 without losing to much?
yeah it’s a little bare bones, it’s not worth more than a single playthrough really. Because the events of 1 are expanded on in 2 and some of the story beats land a little better if you knew the characters from 1 it’s worth playing once for novelty - but it being a 16 year old game it shows its age.
After what they did to my boy claptrap they can eat it. It’s obvious that the voice acting department is going to go out of the way to deservedly sabotage this series until it finally gives up.
2 was where the series really peaked. The first did some new things, and brought some fresh life into the shooter genre.
2 expanded upon it, and had a much better story. It was also in the heyday of matchmaking game lobbies, so it was easy to boot up the match finder and jump into a game with someone. Probably half of my Steam friends list came from playing this game and just vibing with people on voice chat while we ran through the side quests.
The prequel was… Alright? I’d put it about on par with the first game. It didn’t bring anything new or exciting to the table, but it was good at what it did.
Then 3 was just bad. It felt really cringey, in a “how do you do, fellow kids” kind of way. Like it was trying too hard.
And now 4 sounds like more of 3. The game sounds rushed, and the CEO’s attempting to cover for that rush makes him sound woefully out of touch. There’s no good reason that cel-shaded graphics should require a 5090 to run smoothly.
As a very early backer of S42 way back in apparently 2012: It never ceases to annoy me that The Wing Commander Guy has once again managed to do everything possible to NOT make a fucking Wing Commander. This is, what, the third big clusterfuck and the first one where there was nobody to take it away from him and just finish it themselves? But, whatever.
As a big fan of elite games: I am really glad star citizen “exists” to contrast Elite Dangerous and has led to some truly amazing games in the genre. Some of which actually ARE more Wing Commander than not (Everspace 2 is basically the Freelancer that was promised). Now we just need some studio to make a proper Freespace game.
All that said: I don’t like it but I weirdly keep coming back to the thought process that Star Citizen actually IS delivering on its “promise” to the backers… of the past decade or so. Not the OGs. Fuck us.
Because they were never sold on actually playing a game. They were sold on a dream. It is the same logic by which you watch Aisha Tyler do VO for a Tom Clancy game and think that you and your friends are also going to be super sweaty tier seven operators. Or how you watch your favorite group of online youtubers read off their pre-written jokes and pretend to be shocked while playing “friendslop” games. Or… you are a non-sicko who read too many AARs of Dwarf Fortress and thought you would boatmurder too.
Its the idea of spending money to Dream. You know you’ll never actually do what you saw the pretty people do. But you THINK you will and, by owning a copy of Garry’s Mod that you will never boot up, you think you will too.
Obviously the star citizen heads are spending WAY more than 20 bucks a pop and some are buying multiple megaships they’ll never use meaningfully. But it is hard to not see parallels to the people who buy a DCS plane because they want to pretend that one day they will learn how to fly that jet.
And… truth be told, I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the annual charity streams where Drew Scanlon (The Blinking White Guy) and Vinny Caravella attempt to play Star Citizen and spend an hour or two crashing to desktop, getting confused, and accomplishing absolutely nothing. Hell, I think there were a few years where they never even found each other in the space station?
Also, as much as Freelancer hurt, I’ll never stop laughing/being annoyed that he managed to take a sci-fi movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr AND Baby Busey AND Matthew Lillard and turn it into a charisma-free void with no redeeming qualities. Like, you gotta put some fricking effort into that. Those guys could make reading the dictionary be entertaining.
I liked this game a lot when I first started playing. Now in the back half of the game its just disappointing. Desyncs, crashes, and uneven balance all over the place. It has its charms but not something I would recommend anymore. Good to see they are on the right side of this though
Second time playing through, played before Lex Arbites and picked it up again after.
Genuinely, only had 1 crash on this run, maybe 3 on the last. All happened on Qetza Temer. But the uneven balance I can agree with. I’m playing through on the difficulty above medium (whatever it’s called) and now that I’m in the 4th act, sometimes they knock a party member in the first turn, sometimes my arch-militant will kick one guy down and stun him, shoot 7 more and kill 4, Heroic Action, more shooting, boss already compromised and surrounded by my melee and Cassia is making EVERYBODY whack him down.
Love it. It frustrates me. If it wasn’t Warhammer, it would only be a 6.5-7/10, but it’s so jam packed with lore tie ins that if you like the universe it’s at least a solid 8-9 for the love they put into it and continual update/community feedback. But that’s just like, my opinion, man
Not sure if this applies to you, but when it just released early on, there were difficulties between versions and save games from earlier ones didn’t play nice after updates, so I struggled to get through act 2, but then I disabled the auto update and played through it pretty much flawlessly, granted I had to start a new save file.
It hasn’t been the worst on my solo play through, mostly on a group one. There are a variety of issues that are workable, like how you will frequently start combats separated unless your group has the discipline of saints, or how one character will literally never be able to join combat because the terrain is impassable for him and him alone once initiative starts. These things we dealt with, but when combined with hours of lost progress from crashes and desyncs we threw in the towel
Right-wing 101: “we need to destroy social safety net X because the immigrants/criminals/lazy/fraudsters are smooching it from hard-working, honest citizens!”
Translation: we need to take services away from the working class so gazillionaires can have an extra tax break and buy a bigger yacht to put their current yacht on.
Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than… your actual existence.
But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.
This article is basically the equivalent of “In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit”
As the article says, this should be the norm, not the exception, but how can we expect it to become the norm if they don’t even get positive press for it?
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
No. This shouldn’t be the norm. How “successful” a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait… the CEO doesn’t have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.
I’ll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.
The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year… 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don’t know those initial sales figures, we do know that… 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another “final for reals this time” content drop for Terraria.
I agree with all of your points, but if we don’t even shine a positive light on steps in the right direction, then what are we supposed to do? Wait until we’re in a utopia, then start acknowledging improvements?
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so I’d still say worth celebrating.
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so is still say worth celebrating.
It is a “positive step” up from the hellscape that has been used to underpay and screw over devs for decades now.
I get we all want to feel good and not have to give a shit about actual labor issues and compensation of workers. But… this is just the kind of shit that makes it even easier to continue abusing the people who make the games we love and make sure that the golden parachute upper level managers get to have 500 person studios all on the back of having been at a meeting for a successful game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well. If they get a material reward for the big windfall they helped their employer get, that’s a good thing. You could argue they deserve pay raises instead, and I’d be inclined to agree, but then we’re agreeing on the principle and just quibbling over the extent.
Its not a false dilemma, devs getting the boot after release is fairly common in this industry. Also not sure why you keep bringing it back to chuds and bigots, since that has nothing to do with the topic.
Guess what impacts sales figures and even metacritic scores these days?
Assholes like asmongold. Because getting your game review bombed and having all the twitch streamers checking out your game have their unpaid moderators run triple time because they didn’t sticky a clip of them calling the character generator “woke trash”? That severely impacts sales. And Games Media is in a horrible state and the more corporate outlets (but also even a lot of the independent ones) just aren’t going to want that smoke for daring to say a game was fun if it is the latest “culture war” game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well.
There is a reason that it has increasingly become a good practice to refer to “total compensation”. Because, yeah, everyone loves getting told by the CEO that they are essential and saved the company and are awesome and everybody gets a day off … but only if they give the CEO time to peel out in his new ferrari first. But the reality is that that is baked into the expected salary and you are effectively taking a pay cut any year you don’t meet those arbitrary criteria… which are almost always never something YOU have any control over.
And you know who DOESN’T get a pay cut in the years where half your department got fired on a Thursday?
Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don’t have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.
I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.
The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.
As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).
As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren’t tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a “dark maga” hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And… fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
I mean you could make a studio where there is no manager (how does that work I’m not sure) and you’d still need to make financial forecasting if you want the studio to be an entity that continues to exist. Like I don’t understand your logic here, the only other alternative is to make everyone’s salary contingent to sales and then the pie is divided evenly like in a coop model but that means a lot more of the financial risk is shouldered by the devs and you probably don’t get paid until the game releases.
Like what is a proper alternative that: a) pays you a salary while the game is being developed b) accounts for the risk inherent with not knowing the future?
As someone who has had to paint mini faces before, this isn’t aweful, not great by any means but could have been much worse. They definitely need to thin their paints, probably use a smaller brush, and go slower. But in the person would painted this’ defense, faces are so hard to do well, and even harder to fix if you fuck it up.
This has got to be machine printed right? They’re no worse than Wizard’s usual minis, but yeah they always suck. The biggest problem IMO is the sculpt, they look like they’re made out of mud. I assume it has to do with the rubber they use. I don’t know, I’m way too spoiled by printing my own to consider buying something that looks this bad.
Their plastic/resin is garbage, and you’re right that the sculpts are flawed, especially in the finder details. I bet if they tried this in metal it would have worked out better.
I feel like Leeroy Jenkins is the millenials “Jeronimo”, I 100% shout it in its place and I can assure you some shouted it while jumping out of an airplane and their instuctor or officer had no clue what they were talking about, and that will always make me chuckle.
Lol it’s such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it’s a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
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